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A Critical Theory of Subalternity: Rethinking Class in Indian Historiography1 Vinayak Chaturvedi

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A Critical Theory of Subalternity: Rethinking Class in Indian Historiography1 Vinayak Chaturvedi A Critical Theory of Subalternity: Rethinking Class in Indian Historiography1 Vinayak Chaturvedi In the early 1980s, a small group of Marxist scholars influenced by Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks introduced “subaltern” as a new analytic category with- in modern Indian historiography.2 The scholars, led by Ranajit Guha, were dissat- isfied with the interpretations of India’s nationalist movement, which had long neglected “the politics of the people”, or the subaltern classes, in the making of the Indian nation.3 For Guha, this historiography had been dominated by an elit- ism of colonialists, bourgeois nationalists, and even orthodox Marxists, who had signally failed to take into account “the contributions made by the people on their own, that is, independently of the elite”.4 Guha argued that the vast historiography of the Freedom Movement of the nineteenth and twentieth century was “un-histor- ical”, “blinkered”, and “one-sided” because it primarily focused on the domain of elite politics while silencing and refusing to interpret subaltern pasts.5 He further explained that elitist historiography was narrow and partial as a direct consequence of a commitment by scholars to a particular “class outlook” which privileged the ideas, activities, and politics of the British colonizers and dominant groups in Indian society. Guha founded the Subaltern Studies project in collaboration with Shahid Amin, David Arnold, Partha Chatterjee, David Hardiman, and Gyanendra Pandey with the specific aim of providing a corrective to the historiography by “combating elitism” in academic research and writings.6 Starting in 1982, the col- lective began publishing thick, detailed essays in a series called Subaltern Studies in which the subaltern classes were at the center of history writing. In the “Preface” to the first volume of Subaltern Studies, Guha explained that the term “subaltern” would be used by the authors in the series as a “general attribute of subordination in South Asian society”.7 However, Guha was not sim- ply interested in examining questions of subordination in a classical Marxist framework defined by the logic of capital. Instead, he argued that the subaltern condition could be based on caste, age, gender, office, or any other way, including, but not limited to class.8 Guha further stated that he was centrally interested in interpreting the culture that informed subalternity, while also addressing concerns about history, politics, economics, and sociology. Needless to say, this was a depar- ture from Gramsci’s own writings on the subaltern classes in his “Notes on Italian History”, which, according to Guha, had directly influenced the founding of his project. Gramsci had used “subaltern” in his writings as a substitute for “prole- tariat” while in prison in the 1930s to avoid government censors who wanted to prevent Gramsci’s political writings from entering the public sphere. But Guha and his collaborators were not interested in simply applying Gramsci’s own defini- tion of the term subaltern or his interpretations of subaltern history within their 9 © Left History 12.1 (Spring/Summer 2007) 10 Chaturvedi own scholarly work.9 Instead, the Subaltern Studies collective sought to construct a critical theory of subalternity that was initially inspired by Gramscian Marxism and then reconfigured to interpret and analyze South Asian history and society beyond the parameters which could have been anticipated by Gramsci himself. Guha argued that the politics of subaltern classes in colonial India did not exhibit the characteristics of the rural groups described by Gramsci. Specifically, he disagreed with one of Gramsci’s central claims that “subaltern groups are always subject to the activity of ruling groups, even when they rebel and rise up”.10 Guha stated that the domain of subaltern politics was autonomous from elite poli- tics: that is, “it neither originated from elite politics nor did its existence depend on the latter”11 He claimed that subaltern politics tended to be violent because subaltern classes were forced to resist the conditions of elite domination and extra-economic coercion in their everyday lives. Yet, Guha explained that factors of domination and coercion were not simply based or determined by the class dynamics in Indian society. He pointed out that British colonialism had left an “uneven” impact on economic and social developments in India, therefore, it was necessary to understand how different sections of society were affected from “area to area”. Within Indian historiography the emphasis on understanding pol- itics on the basis of class structures had obscured the fact that one group which was dominant in one region or locality of India, was actually dominated in anoth- er. Guha claimed that by moving away from an analysis of politics from an all- India level focusing on class dynamics, it was necessary for the historian to under- stand the heterogeneity and ambiguity in within society and sort out these tensions “on the basis of a close and judicious reading of evidence”.12 For Guha, the broader framework which he outlined provided a new direction for new enquiry. In the early volumes of Subaltern Studies and in Guha’s own masterful study of rural revolts in Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, there were echoes of the Marxian themes of class struggle and class conflict to describe sub- altern political mobilization, but the turn towards a cultural analysis of the subal- tern condition was already present.13 Guha and his fellow collaborators had supplanted the analytics of class from a classical Marxist framework in favor of a critical subalternity. Guha had been dissatisfied with the unreflexive, techno-economic determinism of a Marxian orthodoxy that had dominated Indian historiography.14 His initial turn towards Gramsci and the assertion of a subaltern perspective into history writing was a way to rethink the nature of class-based analysis in the making of the Indian nation.15 Further Guha’s own writings exemplified a further engagement with theorists like Ferdinand de Sassure, Claude Levi-Strauss, and Roland Barthes. However, it should be remembered that Guha did not want to abandon the idea of class alto- gether, but argued that it was one of several factors for historians to consider when analyzing the subaltern condition. Guha’s intervention provided an oppor- tunity for the Marxists scholars associated with the project, and beyond, to write A Critical Theory of Subalternity 11 new political histories of colonial India without having to abandon the traditions of historical materialism. In fact, it could be argued that from the onset of the Subaltern Studies project, the contours of post-Marxism were already demarcated in the early writings of Guha and fellow Subalternists. While there was general agreement with Guha’s arguments in founding the Subaltern Studies project, individual scholars who formed the collective often diverged in their own respective writings when it came to interpreting the subal- tern condition. In fact, the plurality of theories and methodologies were not only celebrated as central to the project, but they were thought to be necessary in understanding the diverse nature of subaltern politics in India which had thus far not been considered in the historiography. A commitment to the social history tradition of writing “history from below” certainly loomed large in the scholarship of several Subalternists, but others were hinting towards cultural history where the ideas of Gramsci and Marx were integrated with Foucault and Derrida. Class Analysis in Early Subaltern Studies For David Hardiman, a class analysis of agrarian society in western India helped to explain the emergence and participation of peasants in the nationalist move- ment.16 Hardiman’s detailed local study of Kheda district in Gujarat helped to illustrate the ways in which the “middle peasantry” was the vanguard of agrarian nationalism. Influenced by the writings of Eric R. Wolf and the middle peasant thesis, Hardiman explained that middle peasants, unlike poor peasants, rich peas- ants or the landed elite, were politically the most radical sections of rural society.17 He was committed to illustrating that the middle peasants functioned autonomously —in the spirit argued by Guha—and harnessed the support for the nationalist movement by influencing others in the locality. Hardiman’s argument was a fun- damental break from the historiography of the region, which had argued that rich peasants or elites were responsible for directing the ideas, sentiments, and politics associated with nationalism in Gujarat. For Hardiman, the middle-peasants con- stituted the subaltern classes. While Hardiman’s argument appeared to be deter- mined by the material conditions of peasants who could be classified as “middle peasants”, he qualified his claims by stating that the caste and kinship ties within the peasantry were equally important factors to understanding political mobiliza- tion in the locality. After all, not all middle peasants became nationalists, only those who belonged to a particular caste in Kheda district. The convergence of class and caste in Hardiman’s writings served as an important contribution to the understanding of nationalist politics, but, equally, it illustrated an approach to writ- ing about subaltern classes, as it was no longer necessary for scholars to have to choose between class or caste analysis to understand politics. An integrative sub- altern history provided an alternative
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